as this post moves in... up the river without a paddle...

i know, the "THIS SPACE RESERVED: game 5 commentary coming soon..." post has been up for more than a day... it's not my fault, i swear... vice city's up on my computer all day when michael stays home =/

moving on, now... pistons have a chance to win the east at home =] everybody loves hamilton =] and tayshaun prince... lanky as hell, but so long and fast...

... yeah, yeah, make your jokes...

and hunter... i'm glad he got traded to the pistons. he'd get no time as a laker... he still doesn't get enough time as a piston, but... he's hit-or-miss-ish, i guess...

and something finally went right in officiating... reggie miller, while making a jump shot, kicks out his legs, hooks billups (i think it was billups...), and goes down on his face... and is called for the offensive foul! i hate it when players go of our their way to draw fouls. there should be a diving call in basketball, as well...

doc rivers... i can't stand it anymore. during the regular season, i noticed that he calls medvedenko "medevenko." okay, that's fine... it's not an easy name to say. but the more i listen to him, the more i'm convinced that he makes up his own names... he calls it the "conseeko" field house. and austin croshere is "croJEER," with a soft j sound. actually, sometimes he calls him "crojer." think "closure" in an asian accent. yeah.

i still prefer espn games over tnt ones, though. first of all, tnt's been having technical difficulties. but even without the fuzzy picture and the spotty sound... tnt has marv alberts *and* doug collins. kings of insight, those two... but the most annoying thing about tnt games is the in-game advertisement. no, i don't mean those banners on the scorer's table... i'm talking about the ads that the network superimposes on the game. sometimes they screw up the aspect ratio inserting a bar on the bottom of the screen... and considering i'm watching on a wide screen anyway, everything becomes really, really flat. espn inserts a bar sometimes, but it's usually for scores, not ads... and they shrink the entire picture, so the aspect ratio is unharmed. but the worst ads are the ones that show up in the corners... they started out tiny, but still somewhat annoying... they've now grown to be a third of the screen (linearly), and they COVER PART OF THE COURT when they put these ads up (oh, yeah, did i mention that they're no longer translucent?). and there's sound to them! not as bad for basketball, but when they do it during shows and movies... i'm beginning to hate tnt...

wait... where's my bobber?i've never lost so many hooks in a day...

yeah, so fishing this morning... didn't leave the house 'til about 8 (yeah, yeah, but nobody got up on time... it wasn't just me...), but i'm still incredibly tired 'cause i stayed up later than i intended to... stayed online about an hour longer than i'd planned, and then i was on the phone even after i got offline... not that i mind ;p

i definitely haven't been fishing in way too long. i get there, set up, bait the hook... and cast into the tree =/ yeah, who's smart? i did that a few times today... i was never really good at casting sidearm, but... the beginning of today was really, really sad...

anyway, i only lost one hook to the trees... where'd the other four go? (that's right... lost five hooks, caught four fish... wadaya think of that ratio?) two went to this egg-covered log in the water. i wasn't the only one to have lost hooks to that, but i think i'm the only one to have lost two to it... another went to the bass that snapped the lead on my sunfish setup (it's a 4 lb lead, but, um... yeah, we were lazy and didn't retie everything before we went... so... <snap>... oops. the thing just ran away with my small hook...). so there's probably a bass swimming around, sporting a new lip piercing...

the worst one of the day, though, was the last hook i lost, which was to the last fish i caught. i'd just thrown back one sunfish (all i caught, all day... dad got a bluegill... so pretty... i want one for an aquarium ;p), and i recast... and my bobber didn't come back up. i was so confused. it didn't come back up, but there was no struggling... so i just kinda stood there, staring at the water, dumbfounded. about five seconds later, with the bobber still mia, i decide to reel in and check on the setup, and it turns out that a sunfish had swallowed my hook. i assume that it snapped as soon as the bait went into the water (do they even do that?). either way, the hook was gone, and the fish started bleeding profusely when we were examining it. nicked gill, i hope =/ how would i have known to set the hook as soon as i cast? uugh... poor fish.

oh, and funniest quote of the day... "eeew! it's peeing!" (michael, about one of the first fish he caught this morning)

are we that obviously together?and i mean, i'm all for equality, but...

yeah, so ice cream date this afternoon. well, not so much afternoon... it was 1:30, so it's kinda early for us ;p

anyway, so i get there, and i see z's car, but i'm not sure it's her car 'cause i don't know her exact license number... so i walk in, and i'm looking around, and the waitress walks up to me and says "she's here, she's waiting for you," and then points at z... um... huh? we haven't been there in forever... i mean, granted, she's always our waitress, but... does she remember us? or do we just seem like people that would be waiting for each other...?

anyway, so we end up getting waaaay too much food. well, not me, z. like i said, i wasn't there for lunch. so z wrapped up half her food, and then took like, two bites of her ice cream on apple pie (apple pie a la mode, apple pie sundae, whatever you wanna call it), and the rest came to my house. the waitress was really nice... she wrapped it up for her and put it in the freezer until we were ready to leave.

so we headed out to fair oaks after dropping the pie off at my house, 'cause zarin's birthday's coming up... took forever, but actually managed to find a necklace that we both liked, and thought zarin would like (and it was all alone and hidden under stuff... i'm not sure how z managed to find it... and neither is she...) anyway, we went underwear shopping after that (it started out as us looking for these pajama sets, but, yeah, that didn't work out)...

anyway, last night... that game... was terribly frustrating. fouls in both directions going uncalled, fouls getting called the wrong way... at least it was in both directions, i guess, but... it was more the players than the refs that pissed me off this time. it turned into such a dirty game... though it's probably the refs' fault.

flopping became such a huge deal. madsen, who normally plays at a 45 degree angle to o'neal (you think i'm kidding? watch), suddenly stands up as he's anticipating o'neal's elbow, and starts falling back before the elbow got anywhere near him (though he did end up getting hit and falling pretty hard... he puts himself on the line so much...), and malone doing the same at the other end (or, rather, at the same end in a different quarter... you get the idea)... they both got their calls...

i have to admit, though... i was nearly out of my wits when the two refs disagreed on that peyton-szczerbiak contact. szczerbiak does that all the time (though admittedly not usually *behind* him), and he usually gets the call for it. for that matter, he almost got it this time, even though he threw and elbow behind him. fuckard.

on a lighter note... fisher had a nice game =]
wanna see more george...

hands off!the pistons need a *real* law firm...

REFS! i am so fed up with the officiating in this series... what a crock! absolutely ridiculous... at the end, there were so many pacer fouls that they just wouldn't call... o'neal traveling? the contact on the ben wallace putback? no call! what was that? and they were talking about hamilton being lucky that he didn't get called for reggie initiating the contact... excuse me? reggie lowered his shoulder and jumped into hamilton, and not only did they not call the offensive foul on reggie, they're counting hamilton lucky for not getting called?

yeah, i know the pistons won anyway... and i'm happy for that =]
but... refs... REFS! AARGH!

this may require some censorship...

yeah, i'm on dialup, and can't get this to load completely yet (yeah, i'm impatient), but i figured... it's jim, so it's probably worth sharing...

wait... is there a choice?

an ad on the la daily news... made me so mad...

... WHERE ARE THE PISTONS!?!?

to whom it may concern: thanks for the ride(fly-or-die, and some good ol' hoops)

yeah, so i wasn't in a very good mood earlier... got into a worse mood... confrontation problems, so to speak. needed a pick-me-up, something to put a smile on my face...

so i went for a ride. to fountainhead. windings. real fast. much trust... never crossed the double yellow ;p sat by the water, had some nostalgic moments...

saw my parents on the way out; thought they were gonna be mad. i missed three phone calls from them while on the road... tried to call back at the same time they were trying to call me... not so mad, i think. letting go maybe. i hope.


yeah, so... game 3 tonight. after the antics of game two (what the hell were those calls? why the need for all the double-t's? and why was malone fined when sczerbiak wasn't? that hit was sooo much worse. ridiculous), i was a little wary... but tonight's game was only slightly charged from that. plus, george had a good game =] the no-call on madsen purposefully fouling o'neal was weird, though. i usually have much respect for dan crawford (unlike, say, joe crawford), but that... his job is to make judgements, not statements. please... seriously. i'm not talking any more about that...

of course, it wasn't nearly as bad as the officiating last night. tayshaun was so set. and outside the restricted area. and there was a lowered shoulder. amazing block later, though... came from nowhere, disappeared into the crowd. the double-dribble call on billups was too ridiculous, though. first of all, he didn't. second, the official was behind him, and couldn't see what was going on anyway... so... what kind of call was that? and the last call on hamilton... miller thought it was called on him. does that tell you anything? speaking of hamilton... "if i'm almost tired, i know reggie's exausted." he's like a little kid, out there, though... zipping all over the place at the end of the game when everybody else is just waiting for stuff to happen. not blowing smoke, that one...

but yeah, even after all that, and after ben wallace sitting out most of the first half (i missed what actually happened because michael was watching kim possible... <GRRR>), pistons owned =D

pre-ramble: merc's version

yeah, so my stream of consciousness sounds oddly like a blog sometimes, so i figured i'd start one. plus, nobody really wants to listen to me ramble about the playoffs anymore (with the exception of maybe navid), so that's probably coming here...

don't feel like spending time now, so i just picked a dark default skin that looked appropriately annoying. haven't seen what it actually looks like yet... we'll see how long it takes me to actually set this thing up. or even if i stick to it...

and yeah, hopefully this'll take some of the stress off my aim profile.